This is Jack - a guy that met Satan and tricked him into promising to never take his soul
He wasn't good enough for paradise either, so when he died he ended up in purgatory
Death has now brought him back to life to deal with Satan's Halloween Shenanigans, in exchange for a solution to his Eternal Torment

So this is Jack McLantern – my take on the Jack o’ lantern myth – what happened after the guy who convinced Satan not to take his soul… well it’s not as dire as it sounds. Apparently Death now needs his – your – help – and since you are stuck in purgatory he brings you to the mortal plane to help him clean up some shenanigans and maybe he can help you find your way as well.

Drawing from Tim Burton which is not obvious at the moment, but will be when I start implementing more final graphics and inspired by Medievil and the adventures of Sir Daniel Fortesque (which was also inspired by Tim Burton), I wanted to make a 3rd person cartoony action platformer instead of the realistic/dark/grim stuff I usually aim to make.

After playing some Medievil I noticed that it has a lot in common with God of War: let’s fight enemies, find chests and kill bosses.

This God of War parallel gave me the idea for the weapons McLantern would use: an axe. So the idea started fleshing out and a coding thingy wanted to be made, getting a Kratos like axe in Unity.

I then spent some time making some enemies to hit with the axe:

Of course someone said that’s neat and that it would be better if the ragdolls received force, which is something I had automatically from the functionality of the axe, but was too much, sending the dolls to high heavens – which was funny, but broke the models too much.

So I found some time and implemented a more controllable impact force that seems to work like a charm:

This was really easy to implement, the only tricky thing was making sure the character didn’t snag on the ragdolls while performing the action, but being able to walk over them once it has been performed. In Unity this was just a matter of switching a Physics layer interaction bool on/off, which is controlled by animation events, just like the collider that pushes them out of the way.

Now this is fun of course, but you can basically spam it and take out a horde of zombies no sweat, I destroyed my game.

What to do, what to do…

Let’s add a stamina bar, so you have to switch up, right? And why would you not spam the axe instead? Well because that works with magic, duh… So I decided to try out what has basically become the classic: Health Stamina Mana trio of health bars.

So I started from an axe and ended up with abilities, stamina, magic and cool ragdoll gameplay.

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I love the idea of this game and its look. I think however that some of animations and sounds could use some work, though, especially in terms of the fireball and when the axe hits a target. I think what would be cool to see is something like a stylized aftereffect when the fireballs makes an impact, like it creates a skull/jackolantern face after it explodes or something. From a control scheme pov, I'm a little confused as to why jump isn't the A button and slide isn't the right bumper, as it would be simpler imo. One thing I am a little concerned about is enemy, stage and combat variety; granted, this is in its very early stages, and it looks very promising, but I'm somewhat concerned that there won't be variety as far as enemy types, attack patterns and that the combo would just be mindless hacking. I'm definitely keeping an eye on this. I wish you the best of luck.